Charlie Stross on American Rail Service

So, Charlie Stross has left Seattle for Portland. I've done that route myself, several times, but his take on what I consider one of the loveliest and most relaxing travel experiences in the United States is fascinating:

You can get beer on that train. In fact, there's a choice of microbrews (as well as the usual horse piss) in the galley. ...

I was gobsmacked by how slow and inefficient the process of catching the train in America feels, compared to even the ghastly suboptimization of Virgin or National Express in the UK, never mind Japan Rail. ...

The galley was as good as can be expected on a rail service, certainly on a par with non-US equivalents, and the staff were friendly and helpful. However, the ride was so bumpy we were wondering if they'd outsourced track maintenance to RailTrack (in the bad, pre-Hatfield days). And the train was so slow it was almost surreal. It took three and a half hours to cover just 144 miles. A good thing the scenery was picturesque; I had a lot of time to stare at it. ...

There are many reasons why passenger rail is the unwanted stepchild of transport policy in the USA; a lack of suitable track signaling, priority given to freight over passenger services, routes laid out in the 1930s and earlier rather than between current centres of population and commerce, and so on. But despite understanding why, I find it really strange that in this day and age, a critical chunk of the USA's infrastructure barely rises to the level of third world quality.

Read it all here.

Recursion in Django with Treebeard, templates, and python generator

To spare you all the reams of source code, I'll just point you to my latest geek addition:Template recursion in Django with Treebeard, in which I solve one of the great conundrums of Django: how to draw stuff recursively. Django templates just don't like recursion, and I do.

I'm slowly but surely learning how to express myself in Django. Stuff like this is deep geek head-first no-nonsense, which is why I enjoy it. Now that I've got a heirarchal rendering system and understand how the heirarchal engine works, my next step is to create it as a manipulable list in proper HTML with Javascript handling.